Help Métis Toddler Stay With Family

I pray ministry officials eventually think of the child's future and leave her with the only family she has known, rather than trying to save face at the expense of the child's happiness and security.

Please let them keep their baby girl. There is no reason to take her from the only home and family she's ever know. It's a bond not blood that makes a family

PLEASE leave this sweet little one with the only family she has known and that LLOVE her!!!!!

Would be lovely if she could be reunited with her brothers but at what personal cost? It seems far better to me that she stay in touch with her birth parents and remain in her current stable home.

This child absolutely must stay with her foster family or suffer the insecurity of the rifted parent-child bond for the rest of her life. What is the ministry thinking? Or are they?

The little girl is right where she belongs. The ridiculous expenditure to take her away from her adoptive parents and the contact with her birth mother makes absolutely no sense. Let SS stay where she is, in 'her home' where she is loved and belongs.

You find these posts at http://ronunruhgps.blogspot.ca This one is an opinion by Ray Ferris, my advocacy colleague, an experienced former Ministry of Children social worker and author of 'The Art of Child Protection." The story of the foster parents trying to adopt a child is a classic example of conflict between the different rights of children. Children’s rights are set out in the CFCSA. Children’s best interests are paramount and include the right to continuity of care. The right to kinship contact, kinship placement timely decision making and cultural preservation. No individual right is paramount, but some rights become more important as time passes and conflicts can occur. It is then that a balance between rights must be sought requiring good judgement. Unfortunately, good judgement seems to be a scarce commodity in this ministry. They will often treat one right as paramount inappropriately. They use right to privacy to shroud everything in secrecy, sometimes withholding information from people with a need and right to know. Often they form a plan, but take so long to implement it that it becomes redundant, but they do not reassess things. As in the case covered by Laura Kane, placement with siblings in Ontario might have seemed a good idea at the time, but over two years later it was not. The right to timeliness has gone under. Continuity of care gained importance along with stability, security and the love that the adoption would give them. They have the cultural continuity and the kinship contact right where they are. As the foster mum pointed out, the natural parents are welcome to keep contact and the damage of emotional danger is well established in the literature. Don’t blame the social workers. Heavy staff turnover and little training means that a case can get several different green social workers in a year.

Here was my article on Jan 21/16 -- This is a highly emotional custody battle. It's playing out in a B.C. Court. The B.C. Ministry of Children have decided to remove a happy Metis toddler from her Metis foster parents who reside on Vancouver Island and relocate her to Ontario to the non Metis couple who are raising the girl's siblings. This two year old has never met her siblings and her biological parents who wish to continue contact also reside on Vancouver Island. Her birth father said, “We love our daughter very, very much. And she needs to stay here. She needs to stay where her home is.” "She's so happy." “The foster parents are amazing. They’re wonderful people,” the birth father added. “I wish they were my own parents in some ways.” ---- Tomorrow an incisive response from Ray Ferris. The two-year old girl's foster parents are petitioning B.C. Supreme Court to allow them to adopt the child, and are arguing girl has already formed a strong emotional bond with them. The government contests this bid by arguing that it’s an abuse of the court process because another judge already sided with the ministry last year. The foster family’s lawyer, Jack Hittrich, said the new petition must be considered because it includes an unheard argument over S.S.’s constitutional rights. Hittrich is asking a B.C. Supreme Court judge for an interim order to keep the girl in the care of the foster parents until a full hearing on their petition can be held later this year. Hittrich told the judge this past Friday that moving the girl across the country, and then possibly moving her back if the petition is successful, would harm her emotionally and mentally. “There’s overwhelming evidence before you that the disruption of the status quo, pending the full hearing of the current petition, is simply not in the best interests of this little girl,” he said. The foster mom says she knew the Ministry intended to move the infant girl to Ontario, but says the MCFD took to long, and now in t

Please look at the blog posthttp://ronunruhgps.blogspot.ca/2016/02/please-sign-this-petition-to-let.html

Once you look at the best interests of the child, keeping the child with its family seems to be the sensible thing to do.

the interests of a child need to come first in child protection matters.

Why is commonsense deserting our public servants? Where is Mary Ellen Trefonte now! The two year old should remain with her adoptive parents----forever

I am a child protection expert who heartily endorses this placement

if the child is in a happy healthy environment with people who love her leave her be- she does not need to be traumatised - she needs to be happy and safe.

Respect his current family and wishes; the metis community is united here.

Please keep the child in the only home she knows. Moving will be very traumatic.

I don't understand why they would disrupt the child's life if the current family has been and wishes to continue to be her provider, especially if she has access to her own culture. Wouldn't that fall under "best interests of the child"?

Looks like power has blinded those who need to see most clearly. Do we need to create more broken children?

No child should be taken away from a family that has proved to be best for the child's welfare. If here she can have ties to her family and her community, why are actions being done to uproot her and do what did harm to so many children in the 1960s. Have social workers and government not learned from their past?

Good luck